


Addlement

by meaninglessblah



Category: Batman - All Media Types, DCU
Genre: Alternate Universe - Sub/Dom Dynamics, Drug Use, Dubious Consent, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-05-06
Updated: 2019-05-06
Packaged: 2020-02-27 03:32:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,330
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18730843
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/meaninglessblah/pseuds/meaninglessblah
Summary: Jason's been managing his downscenes perfectly fine on his own. Comes with the territory of being a stubborn-as-all-hell sub. When his dynamic rears up on him during a mission in Estonia, Jason holes up in his hotel room and settles in for an easy drug-induced downscene.He's not expecting his very opportunistic mercenary visitor.





	Addlement

Jason’s in Estonia when the urge to go down sweeps over him. It blindsides him a little, enough that he has to sidestep to dodge the wayward slice of a blade aimed for his spleen. He turns the drug-dealer-turned-human-shield he’s got pressed against his chest to divert the next blow, and glares as he aims, safety, trigger, fires into the knife-wielding thug’s skull before he can recover his balance.

The dealer in his arms is choking something derogatory at him, but his Estonian’s passing at best, so he doesn’t get the nuances other than a general _fuck you, you son of a bitch_ , and by then the muzzle of his pistol is parting with the guy’s smoking temple.

Jason takes a step back, letting the body slide to the floor of the grotty apartment with a dull thump, and sucks in a _deep_ breath. The urge, the _need_ , is still there, but actually having a moment to clear his head amidst the adrenaline rush is helping to tamper it down. And now that his skull’s not swimming in it, he has the headspace to be _angry_.

Because he doesn’t need to be dealing with his shitty sub dynamic now, when he’s elbow deep in a case. He’s just lucky this one doesn’t require any particular finesse, or Jason’s pretty sure this would throw a significant wrench in his plans.

It’s his fault, he knows. He’s been putting off a downscene for coming up on two months now, which he knows isn’t conducive to being a level-headed crime boss, but fuck whoever says that he has an obligation to the shitty, writhing nuisance that is his sub tendencies. He didn’t ask to be a sub. He shouldn’t have to deal with the heaping pile of shit that’s been dumped on his plate because of it.

 _Needy_ , is the sneered word that comes to mind, and Jason recoils behind a curl-lipped snarl. There’s no one left alive in the room to see it, but he hates it with a bone-deep passion nonetheless. He swore to himself that he’d never stoop that low again, never be beholden to his body’s sentimental desires, not since-

It’s poorly timed, that’s all. He takes another deeper, calming breath and tries to reason that all things considered, it’s not the _worst_ timing he’s had for those tendencies to rear their heads. He’d put in a lot of effort, back when he was fourteen and face-to-face with small-time crooks and megalomaniac supervillains, to shove down a lot of the side-effects of being a pliant, eager-to-please sub. Turns out a lot of those unsavoury characters tend to lean heavily on the dom end of the spectrum. Jason wonders idly, not for the first time, if its a circumstantial or an inevitable thing - like how CEOs tend to be prone to psychopathological tendencies. Or maybe psychopaths are drawn to CEO roles? He can’t recall which way around it is, and its splitting hairs really. He’d had this debate with Bruce once, and hadn’t been slow to twist the screw in reminding him that he was chief of a large, expensive corporation and did a mighty fine job of posturing an insincere, esteemed version of his former-playboy self. Bruce hadn’t taken fondly to that implication, but he hadn’t outright shut it down either.

It doesn’t matter, either way. It’s past, Jason’s not his Robin anymore (hasn’t been for a long time), and it turns out that instinctual sub needs _don’t_ get rewritten when someone dunks you headfirst into a glowing green pit of Lazarus juice.

Yeah, maybe he’d been a bit hopeful on that one. But he wasn’t exactly surprised to find upon waking that he was still a sub, and resurrection hadn’t neatly cleaned that slate for him.

And there are worse ways to discover you’re desperately in need of a scene. Jason had learnt that one the embarrassing way, back when he was just a scrap of a kid on the streets who neglected his dynamic and slipped into scenes whenever someone was kind enough to throw morsels his way; and relearnt that lesson again the hard way when he’d been training under the League.

The al Ghuls have a funny (read: immensely chauvinistic) way of responding to discovering someone’s s-leaning dynamic. Jason had slid into his first drop a few days out of the Pit, and when he’d come out on the other side shaking with fever and just on the barely lucid side of delirious, Talia had smiled down at him, told him she was _disappointed_ that he hadn’t trusted her to tell her his dynamic, and then shoved him right under into a downscene.

So the forewarning he’s getting now is somewhat of a blessing, to be honest. He’s not going to go down right now, but it’s his body’s subtle way of telling him if he doesn’t get his shit in order and actually manage his dynamic, it’s going to bite him in the ass, and _hard_.

Jason cleans out the room, pats down the bodies for the information he can glean from an ID and a credit card, and then ditches out the third-storey window.

He drags his feet about the whole thing, stopping to get lunch and stock up on some snacks (if he goes into a drop right after a downscene, then he’s not going to have the strength to crawl to the cornerstore, and having food immediately available is just _so much easier_ ). He does some research at his laptop too. Follows up on a few leads that have been itching in the back of his mind for most of the afternoon, and writes down a few notes to refer back to when his concentration isn’t shot to shit by the looming need.

Then Jason sighs and puts down his pen, and strips down to bare bones so he can take a scalding hot shower. The fever his drops bring tend to leave him a sweat-soaked mess, so he likes affording himself this one luxury before he has to get down to the hard and gritty. And showers have always been a great way of getting him into a relaxed state before the scene. They always seem to go down easier if he’s loose and pliable. Like a pill, he thinks bitterly.

He closes all of the tabs on his browser bar one, stabs a few key phrases into the search bar, and then scrolls until he finds a video that ticks most of the boxes. He runs up a playlist that should last him the better part of four hours (just in case), and then mashes his earphones into the jack.

Jason doesn’t put them in, not yet, nor does he play the videos. He stalls by neurotically assembling a small shrine of snacks against one of the hotel cabinets, and beside that, a stack of clean, neatly folded towels. Two super-sized plastic bottles of water join them, and then Jason doesn’t have any excuse left to fuss over.

He hooks the chair around and shoves it backwards against the desk before setting the laptop up on the seat to face him. Double and triple checks that the power cable is in - at the console _and_ at the wall - before settling on the carpet and tilting the screen until the colour saturation suits him.

The visuals aren’t necessary - usually the audio is enough to get him by - but he likes the reminder, the realism. It helps a little, to pretend in his head that they’re talking to him, just him, like his mother used to back when she was managing his dynamic because he was too young to know what a scene was.

Jason heaves a long sigh and crosses his legs beneath him. The curtains are drawn over the balcony doors, and it’s dark outside anyway, so the only light comes softly from the bedside lamp he’d left on to give the room a glowing ambience. The hotel door has a firm _Do Not Disturb_ sign posted to the front, and is locked regardless, so he’s unlikely to get any impromptu visitors. There’s a very mild breeze blowing in from the cracked bathroom window, but otherwise the room is still. Everything seems to be focused on the Youtube video that encompasses his whole screen, and that’s sort of the point.

The videos are there to help lonely (or stubborn, like him) subs go down. The uploaders speak in soft, encouraging tones and the run-time is littered with neutral praises. It’s the easiest method Jason’s found of getting himself down by proxy, and he’ll never admit it to anyone, even at gunpoint. He’s not ready for that level of intimacy, or the _pity_ that comes with the suggestion that a sub can’t find a decent dom to do them the favour of putting them down.

Jason doesn’t want a dom. Doesn’t want one of those fucks anywhere near his minefield of sub-based vulnerabilities. So he watches his videos and he makes do with what’s available to him.

Speaking of which. He smothers a winces and shoves a hand into his back pocket, wiggling free the small back of pills kept there. He swore to himself (again and again, but so had everyone else who he’d watch fall back on the needle) that he wouldn’t resort to drugs for as long as he lived.

But well, Jason’d died, so that promise seemed void sort of anyway, and it’s not like its _easy_ to get yourself down into a scene. You’re not _supposed_ to be able to; that’s the point. It’s supposed to be a loving, wholesome encounter between a sub and a dom or a sub and a dual, and the intimacy shared between partners is supposed to wrap them both up in a cloying embrace of sweet sentimentality that lasts through the rest of their days.

Yeah, Jason had never really bought into that fairytale. Maybe considered it, once or twice, back when he’d lived at the Manor and life had been reasonable and managing a dynamic hadn’t just been another burden on the list of things that seems to come so easily to those with time and means and money. But even then, and for the most part, he called bullshit. Dynamics were a shitty flaw woven into their genetic codes, and just another excuse for him to be bulldozed into doing what others expected of him.

Jason flicks a pair of pills into his palm, and scowls. Synth isn’t the neatest way to force a downscene, but it certainly helps the slide. Can be used pretty maliciously too, if used in the wrong hands. But considering he’s in no one’s hands but his own (the way he likes it, the only way he’ll _allow_ it) Jason’s fairly confident he’ll be able to spare himself from harm.

He’d bought them off an Estonian dealer (different gang, less organised, no particular red flags raised there) after doing some digging into the purity of the strain. He knows how dirty drugs can get, from second-hand experience, and he’s not about to put a mind-altering sedative into his system without running at least a cursory glance over their supply chain.

It’d checked out for the most part, and Jason had handed over the four hundred euro in the dimness of a back-town alley before he’d shoved it in his back pocket and skulked back to his hotel room.

He’s used synth before, on a handful of occasions. Mostly whenever he’d needed to get down out of the comfortable neutrality of his own safehouses. He usually keeps a small (unmarked, don’t want to get any raised brows from snooping vigilante siblings) baggie of them stashed in his primary safehouse, but he hadn’t thought he’d needed to pack it because, well, he hadn’t been planning on going down during this jaunt anyway. So underhanded Estonian-brewed synth is going to have to make do.

Jason thumbs the pills once under a narrowed gaze, before sliding them between his teeth and throwing them back with a chase of water. Then he slots the earbuds in and hits the space bar on his laptop.

The woman on his screen is German, or at least local, with a slight drawling hitch to her English that helps to focus on. She introduces her channel with a bright, soft smile and does a quick runthrough of contents before they launch into the business of the video. Jason’s already starting to feel the drowsy effects of the synth by the time she starts talking him down in a low, rhythmic tone.

The pills won’t put him to sleep; they’re a light sedative at best. But they will make him susceptible to the hallmarks of scening. The woman strokes her hands slowly, carefully down the inside of his laptop screen, purring soft praises into his eardrums as Jason feels himself starting to slip.

The darkness of the room is helping to keep him centered on her voice, and the soft breeze from the slightly ajar window is absently refreshing on his flushed skin. Jason focuses on his breathing patterns as she counts him through, shoving back the lingering feeling of embarrassment at the knowledge that he’s responding to an inanimate laptop. All too soon his head is swimming with murky, lilting pleasure, and his vision isn’t so much focusing on her as the movements anymore. Jason heaves a deep sigh and unfurls his mental fingers from the precipice of his downscene, letting himself slip into the drug-aided stupor.

He doesn’t know how long he’s down for; time gets sort of irrelevant and intangible when he’s down this deep, so he doesn’t mark midnight as it slides by. He doesn’t stir at the brief wash of rain on the balcony outside his room that visits and passes just as quickly. Nor does he stir when the soft pad of booted feet rumbles across the bathroom tiles and comes to a stop beside him.


End file.
